Well that’s why it’s a philosophical(?) question. Yes evolution made the chicken, but what would you call what laid that egg if not a chicken first?
If it wasn’t a chicken that laid it, it’s not a chicken egg, so the egg couldn’t come first. What hatched would be a chicken and it would than lay chicken eggs.
What comes between chickens and their non-chicken ancestors? The problem is in our human need to classify everything into different neat boxes, when it’s an actual long and continuous process. In short, the “dilemma” created is more of an argument about what separates species, and that’s a hell of a rabbit hole with no single answer.
But the answer is the egg, since a chicken born from that egg is different than its parents.
You’re right in that it’s not meant to have an answer as it’s normally told philosophically. But the biological and evolutionary answer is that there is no dividing line to give that answer because species don’t change with individuals but with large populations over great amounts of time. We see those lines because we find fossils of things related to but different enough to others to call them a different name. And the real mind blower is that almost all creatures that did exist never left fossils to find.
The false dilemma of the chicken and the egg shares the same misunderstanding that the “missing link” fallacy does. There’s no line between things except over time and thousands of generations.
Proto-chicken laid the egg. It was a proto-chicken egg. The creature that came out of it had enough genetic variance to be defined as a full chicken.
Note, the question does not ask “what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” It’s just “the egg”. It doesn’t matter what type of egg, as long as a chicken came out of it.
The egg came first. Unless you believe in intelligent design, then some deity poofed the chicken.
Well that’s why it’s a philosophical(?) question. Yes evolution made the chicken, but what would you call what laid that egg if not a chicken first?
If it wasn’t a chicken that laid it, it’s not a chicken egg, so the egg couldn’t come first. What hatched would be a chicken and it would than lay chicken eggs.
What comes between chickens and their non-chicken ancestors? The problem is in our human need to classify everything into different neat boxes, when it’s an actual long and continuous process. In short, the “dilemma” created is more of an argument about what separates species, and that’s a hell of a rabbit hole with no single answer.
But the answer is the egg, since a chicken born from that egg is different than its parents.
But a chicken didn’t lay that egg, so it’s not a chicken egg. That’s the crux of the paradox.
There is no answer is the answer.
You’re right in that it’s not meant to have an answer as it’s normally told philosophically. But the biological and evolutionary answer is that there is no dividing line to give that answer because species don’t change with individuals but with large populations over great amounts of time. We see those lines because we find fossils of things related to but different enough to others to call them a different name. And the real mind blower is that almost all creatures that did exist never left fossils to find.
The false dilemma of the chicken and the egg shares the same misunderstanding that the “missing link” fallacy does. There’s no line between things except over time and thousands of generations.
By that logic there no such thing as a chicken because things never evolve past a certain evolutionary animal.
Proto-chicken laid the egg. It was a proto-chicken egg. The creature that came out of it had enough genetic variance to be defined as a full chicken.
Note, the question does not ask “what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” It’s just “the egg”. It doesn’t matter what type of egg, as long as a chicken came out of it.
From that perspective, the egg came first.